


that is a women's tale (and it is never told to men)

by scuttlesworth



Category: Wonder Woman (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Leaving Home, Mothers and Daughters, Origins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-06
Updated: 2013-06-06
Packaged: 2017-12-14 03:28:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/832175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scuttlesworth/pseuds/scuttlesworth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wonder Woman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	that is a women's tale (and it is never told to men)

She's made from mud. Clay, if you want to be picky, or earth, or sand, or love; but mud nonetheless. Her mother watches her daughter run down the great halls, tracking wet dirty footprints behind her everywhere she goes, and thinks: there was a lesson here. I begged for a gift of the gods and was given what I asked for, but they could have made her from anything. Flowers, or the blood of wolves, or sunlight; but they chose mud. 

Diana's lips twitch. The others would be horrified if they knew what crossed their queen's mind. How appropriate, she thinks, and remembers the childhood feel of the garden under her fingertips, hot sun on the back of her neck, earthworms diving terrified into the soil she disturbed. It has been a thousand years or more since she knelt in the garden. Not since she put on the white robes and became Queen. It's a cruelty to the ones you rule if you make more work by getting dirty unnecessarily; laundry is a privilege, not a thing to waste. So she sits on her throne and slowly sips the red wine, careful not to spill, and nods and smiles and listens and is thought graceful and wise. While there, down the hall, her filthy daughter tumbles and laughs and laughs and laughs, hair a snarled and knotted mess. (A disgrace, some of the more stuck-up women whisper. Hippolyta keeps her mouth shut on who's the disgrace. Diplomacy, m'dear, and tact. She'll need those women's votes later.) (But oh, when Diana smears mud onto their robes as she passes, the Queen is most fiercely amused.) 

There was hot sun on the back of her neck the day the bargain was struck. She knelt on the beach and spoke to the air, begged - prideless, desperate. And they agreed. She knew, she knew the meaning of it all, even then - we give you joy and heartbreak, you are the maker but the thing you made will have its own life. The fates were there weaving, taking from her strand and spinning out another life. A strong life, she begged of them. One strong enough to withstand even the largest of fish caught on its line. On that score the fates brought her more than she'd asked, and she fears for this fearless child. Why did they give you so much strength? The gods when they give gifts see further than any man, but oh. What do they see that will need you to be so very, very strong? And she, queen of peace and strength and wisdom and love, trembles. 

Later Hippolyta will sit on the sleeping mat with a clean and limply exhausted Diana on her lap and pick appart the tangles of her black hair and sing songs of the Minotaur, of spiders and silver stags and pomegranate seeds. She will bend her head and smell the soft sweet scent of daughter, milk and soap and little-girl sweat. Diana will sleep through the night and wake in the morning, and Hippolyta will open her eyes to the first dim light of dawn illuminating her little child, her blessing and reminder and gift and treasure - her little girl clinging to the edge of the windowsill and staring hungrily at the dawn-singing birds. Someday, she'll think sleepily as she squints at her girl, someday you'll fly, my little one. 

 

&&&

 

She's made from mud. She lies there in the reeds on the edge of the embankment with the frogs singing just fingerlengths form her ears, a deafening song of desperation and lust. There, there, the injured deer. It limps down to the stream, head turning warily. It's leg is broken. It cannot run, it cannot mate, it can do nothing now except suffer. She will cure it of all its ills and the queen will have meat for the rest of the week. For Artemis. 

She moves slowly, muscles tensing and relaxing as she shifts. Mustn't make a sound; move slow, slow, slow. Slower than the slug crawling up her arm. There's a leech stuck to her thigh but she doesn't even notice; her arm comes back and then - move now now now, hurl the spear, the rope not far behind, tangle the legs and lunge forward. Strong arms around the deer's neck. There's a blow to her shin - not broken - the snap of the vertebrae under her hands and it's done. 

She's grinning form ear to ear as she walks straight-backed into the palace. Everything here is gloriously clean - tall marble pillars, gauzy curtains fluttering in the breeze - everything is white and gold and palest blue, gloriously lovely. Everything except Diana, Princess. She walks in literally covered in mud, her hair plastered flat with it, streaks on her face, clothing completely brown. A thick smear of blood down one leg shows where the deer caught her with a hoof before dying; she barely feels it. The deer has bled out from the cuts she made. It lies draped over her shoulders as she strides down the hallways, an elegant shawl. 

She could come in the back door. She could go straight to the kitchens. But there's something glorious in watching the matrons roll their eyes and purse their lips, something wonderful in putting a little extra spring in her step and shedding some of that mud on the mosaic tile floors as she makes her way down the palace halls to the kitchen. 

In the kitchen there's no need for extra cockyness. This is a busy place, full of women with powerful arms who appreciate Diana's hunting. The cook shouts with delight at the deer and dismay at Diana's filthy body in her clean work area; Diana is exiled to a stool in the corner and given unlimited sweetcakes (as long as she doesn't move and track anything anywhere). Diana is happy to sit and laugh with the cook while the thick-figured woman dresses bits of meat for roasting. Here, the last of the blood drains into a bowl for breakfast pudding later, and the entrails are pulled out to soak in salt water. Here is pragmatism and the end result of the hunt: food. 

Nothing is better than the hunt. Nothing, Diana knows this. But sometimes it feels just a little too easy, tracking the sick, the lame, the injured. 

 

&&&

 

"Man," says her mother the queen, pale-faced. Diana stares at her in wonder. It is a word she's rarely heard before, in a language she's never heard before, and yet - 

And yet. 

"Man," Diana repeats, and her mother closes her eyes. Looks as though her stone face would weep. This is the face she wears in front of others, not the face she wears as mother. Queen-face, Diana would giggle as a child, and try to make her break her severe expression. 

Her mother the queen steps away from the throne, walks. Diana follows, and the court breaks out into whispers. 

"There is world outside the island," her mother says. They stand in the middle of the long west hall. One side is a marble wall; the other is columns, open to the sky, the cliff falling down below them. Birds are the bane of the cleaners here; they sit on the columns and shit white streaks that must be scrubbed away by ladder. The view is astonishing. The treetops riot below, and where the island ends the sea begins. Sparkling blue goes out to the horizon. 

Diana feels her heart accelerate. This. This is what she pestered her tutors about. This is what she lay in bed at night thinking about as a child. This is what she has wanted ever since she was old enough to ask, where does the water end? She steps close and looks at her mother the queen's face, eyes on that profile. The bump in her mother's nose, the groove that runs down past her mouth. The light illuminates the pores of her mother's skin. Her mother does not look at her. Instead, she gazes blindly out to the sea. 

"The world outside is not like this one. There are two sexes, Diana. Two genders. We are women and they are men." Like animals, Diana thinks. Like deer and rabbits and wolves, two, two. Why are we but one, now, mother? 

"We left," her mother says. Softly. "We left because of the schism. Because in our minds -in the minds of all men and women - we stopped regarding ourselves as human, stopped being one thing and split into two. We were Men and Women, not Human. Not partners but competitors." 

"And because we were two things, because of the separation, we became other to the men. Strangers. And so the men attacked us. Murdered us, beat us, took by force what would have been a gift. Not all men, and not always, but enough. Enough."

She knows this next part. Her mother doesn't say it. Then came the Five, then came the goddesses. Then came the island and the safety and the chance to be at peace. They ran away and hid. 

"It's over now," her mother whispers. Half to herself, half to Diana. "The long wait. I knew it would end. He's slipped through, they've loosened their grip - the Five, I can see light through their fingers. Does it burn or illuminate? Nothing can remain in stasis, this was only half a life... a chance to heal, a chance to be more than we were. A chance to prepare. But now, now it ends, now we return, and if we are not ready, if we are not strong enough or wise enough... If they are stronger... " 

Diana turns away. She has always been the only child of this place. The others - even her mother - all came from elsewhere. She was born here. It's appropriate, that the world made the others and they came here, and island made her and she should leave. The island has always been her home, and she its creation. Made from the ground itself, the pulses of the island run through her veins: the roots, the trees, the birds, the fish. She was made to leave, to do what the island could never do. 

The island loves its women. They tread barefoot on its soil, eat its fruit, send their prayers and cries into its breezes. It loves them and wants to protect them, was made solely for that purpose. But how can it do this when it does not know what it must protect them from? It needs to understand. It needs to see for itself. There are more and more ships, more and more bits of flotsam and jetsam washing ashore. More mysteries - plastic, that's a new thing. Oil, metalworks - it needs to know more. They need to know more. 

Diana has a treasure trove. A cave she found (it showed her, made for her, waiting, with shelves and light and running water) under one edge of the cliffs, filled with the things the island has been collecting. Beer bottles, wooden planks, fishing line, yogurt containers, hats and mines and paint chips. She crouches over them, eyes burning, wanting to know more. Needing to know more. 

And now this. Now the metal bird. It's called a plane, he said, like the thing you use to carve wood, or the flatness in the soil. Now - now there is a he, a woman amputated of one of her letters - this "he" sleeps on the second island. How long as it been waiting for him? Unconsecrated, safety, an intermediary between the Themiscrya and the world. A harbor, a dock, a meeting-place. An adjoinment. He comes, she goes. It will be where she leaves from, she knows this. 

She will see the world. She will see where these things she collects come from. 

And she will hunt. Down there in the darkness of her soul, in the caves below the island, she knows what's coming. The world her women left was broken. It hasn't healed yet, not in all this time. There's still the fracture. There's still the damage. 

Someone - some medic - will need to cure this break, sometime. But in the thousands of years since they left, since her Aunts left, infection has set in. Disease. She's not a surgeon; she can't sew the world up. But she is capable of scouring it clean. She can make it safer, clear out the debris, cut away the dead flesh. Destroy what necrosis has already killed. Debride, she thinks. That's the word. She can prepare the world for They Who Will Come, for the healers. 

It will take years. This is not a small job; it will, perhaps, take lifetimes. And she will change. She will be different, before all this is over. 

"There will be a woman of wonders, who will go forth," her mother says in a firmer tone, and Diana blinks. In the present, her mother turns to face her, golden light illuminating one side of her face, shadows concealing the other. (They have been lost in thought, Diana and the island.) "There must be a competition, to determine who will be the one to represent us to this larger world." There, in her mother's eyes - hope that Diana won't be the one, fear, knowledge. But this is how it must be. Every second must be lived through, even though the outcome is inevitable. 

"I'll win," she tells her mother. There's pride there, and love, and sorrow, and gentleness. 

Her mother's lips thin. "Don't go anticipating," her mother the queen says firmly, although there, her eyes say something different. Her lips say "There are many on this island who will compete, and you are but one." Her eyes say I know, and be safe, and you take my heart with you. 

Diana presses her lips to her mother's cheek. Dry, warm from the sun. She lifts her head and sees her mother, but she also sees other things: distant planes in the blue sky and the distant black dots of ships on the horizon. Encroaching humanity, and their sheltered life exposed. They'll need her out there, standing in the world. She sets her shoulders back and smiles at her mother. "I'll make you proud."

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from a portion of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, in the story of a woman condemned to hell for loving an Endless.


End file.
